primeideal

(SFF Bingo): Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold

2026-04-26T15:16:22Z

Spinoff from the Vorkosigan Saga, set two hundred years before the main series. Leo Graf, an engineer who works for the huge GalacTech company, is sent to a space station to instruct apprentice engineers. Turns out that most of the residents are children (the oldest class is twenty) who were genetically modified to have two extra arms instead of legs and other tweaks to be healthier/optimized for zero-gravity, and are known as "quaddies." Leo is able to stay calm and not react with revulsion, but the more he learns about the quaddies' precarious legal status and treatment, the more he feels like he needs to do something about it, even if he's just one guy. The good news is, sometimes social and ethical problems turn out to be just engineering problems...

In some ways, Leo is a foil to Miles; Miles is a disabled person, surrounded by able-bodied people, but he bluffs his way through things and his heroism turns out to be contagious. Leo is an able-bodied person, surrounded by the quaddies, who are seen as disabled in planetary gravity, and his leadership is similar.

“Or,” Leo raised his voice, “you can take your lives into your own hands. Come with me and put all your risks up front. The big gamble for the big payoff. Let me tell you”—he gulped for courage, mustered megalomania—for surely only a maniac could drive this through to success— “let me tell you about the Promised Land . . .”

I had recently reread part of "The Warrior's Apprentice" so the "please don't yell loudly when you're making a surprise entrance into the room" thing was fresh in my mind...

Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comlinks, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.

There's a similar line with "we have to be careful about what videos we show people." "Oooh, pornography?!" "...No." that has Miles and Elena parallels.

And, of course, the themes of seeing the inherent worth and dignity in every human life, even the smallest and most vulnerable, are clear. (The quaddies were also products of the uterine replicators from Beta Colony, which leads the galaxy in a lot of technological innovations.) There's also a character whose bitterness is similar to that of the villain in "Mountains of Mourning"--when your life has been crushed by the system, it feels unfair for other people to have opportunities that you were denied.

As with Cordelia, Leo's worldview is informed by Christianity, but he's not tendentious about it. Can we jeopardize the mission to rescue one guy:

"Maybe. I’m not sure it’s good military thinking—the precedent had to do with sheep, I believe—but I don’t think I could live with myself if we didn’t at least try to get him back."

The weird legal status of the space station is kind of a parallel with "A Drop of Corruption":

GalacTech holds Rodeo on a ninety-nine-year lease with the government of Orient IV. The original terms of the lease were extremely favorable to us...

A great description of what planetary gravity would be like if you'd never experienced it before:

Leading from the hatch to the hangar floor was a kind of corrugated ramp. Clearly, it was designed to break down the dangerous fight with the omnipresent gravity into little manageable increments. “Stairs.”

The authorities try to enforce a "mothers are naturally parental, they must mind the babies, menfolk do the other stuff" policy, which Leo thinks is ridiculous, coming from a galaxy with uterine replicators, and the upshot is that a new father doesn't understand things like diaper rash and has to have his partner explain it. A good example of the limitations of this kind of societal structure, without being preachy. (This book features the most gripping, stressful, action-packed scene hinging on a diaper bag you've ever seen.)

Early on, it's established that quaddie education focuses on engineering, not great men of history...

“...a typical downsider history of, say, the settlement of Orient IV usually gives about fifteen pages to the year of the Brothers’ War, a temporary if bizarre social aberration—and about two to the actual hundred or so years of settlement and building-up of the planet. Our text gives one paragraph to the war. But the building of the Witgow trans-trench monorail tunnel, with its subsequent beneficial economic effects to both sides, gets five pages. In short, we emphasize the common instead of the rare, building rather than destruction, the normal at the expense of the abnormal. So that the quaddies may never get the idea that the abnormal is somehow expected of them. If you’d like to read the texts, I think you’ll get the idea very quickly.”

“I—yeah, I think I’d better,” Leo murmured. The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei’s brief description made his skin crawl—and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer.

And we get a nice payoff to this much later:

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.

Polar exploration drinking game!

“What if someone asks what happened to my feet?” Silver worried aloud.
“Amputated,” suggested Leo, “due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent.”

I've said this before, but Bujold is great at the "leaving out the parts people skip" of pacing. Like, "Claire and Tony have some questions for Leo about the legal situation elsewhere in the galaxy" > "Claire and Tony make a run for it" follows pretty quickly in succession, whereas in other books I feel like there would be a lot more hedging/introspection before that.

( Spoilers )
Bingo: so, we get one mulligan square every year, and while I have not availed myself of it for the first four, this might be the time when I use one. You could probably make an argument for "politics" but by that token I think you could make an argument for almost anything for "politics."

Edit to add: the ancient and honorable male art of "monitoring the situation!" :D

“Since then we’ve been tracking the D-620, and it’s continued to boost straight toward Rodeo. It doesn’t answer our calls.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“We’re monitoring the situation. I have not yet received orders to do anything about it.”

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Various updates

2026-04-23T21:50:13Z

I was feeling pretty optimistic about the sort-of-blank-verse poem I wrote a couple months ago, both in terms of how I felt about it personally and "no news is good news" when other people are getting rejections via Submission Grinder ;) but that didn't pan out. So now I get to try sending it (and some older stuff) to a new journal. (This is a spinoff of another magazine that I generally like and support but have been burned by in that they never responded, not even to the "hey did you get this," the first time I submitted to them. To their credit, the new mag has a policy of "if you don't hear anything after four weeks, assume rejection.")

Fun fact: in undergrad I semi-often wound up writing blank-verse-ish stuff as the result of a tug of war between my professors, who liked pretentious completely free verse, and me, who preferred more formal constraints like sonnets and stuff. ;) This time at least it's more deliberate.

I am out of the country seeing the world for the next few weeks! Not sure what my computer access will look like, I may have some downtime, but no promises--comments on exchange fic, etc. may be delayed. I have stocked up on plenty of reading material so hopefully there will be a couple bingo reviews coming later or sooner.

In the process of stocking up, there was a free giveaway of hardcopy books on a library shelf, and the original "Mistborn" was up for grabs, score! I don't think I need it on the plane, but good for canon review, or to give to someone else to get them into Sanderson :P

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(SFF Bingo): Sinopticon, translated and edited by Xueting Christine Ni

2026-04-22T23:26:52Z

Anthology of thirteen Chinese science fiction stories, all appearing in English for the first time. Ni notes in the introduction that "Even the most whimsical and humorous of space-travel stories will tend to end with a melancholic tone, because Chinese stories tend not to have happy endings," and in one story's endnotes, that "In the Chinese language, time is signified by the temporal adverb, so all actions are, without context, in the present."

Unfortunately, the prose comes off in many places as clunky at best and not proofread at worst, so I'm not sure how much to chalk up to the translation. And many of the stories (not only those written by men) were weird about (heteronormative) romance.

That being said, given my gripes with the prose, I did want to give a shoutout to "Qiankun and Alex," by Hao Jingfang, for successfully translating three-year-old speech in a way that makes it clear it's a three-year-old and not just clunky prose.

"What am I learning you?" Alex asks Qiankun.
"That which I don't know," Qiankun replies.
"What do you know?" Alex asks again.
"I know a lot of things," Qiankun replies.
"Show," Alex requests.

The two highlights for me were both on the longer side. "The Great Migration," by Ma Boyong, imagines that Mars' close approach to Earth every two years would culturally become an excuse for lots of travel, even when the technological needs weren't as prevalent. If you can suspend your disbelief at the dysfunctional premise, it's very funny (and based in reality, as Ni mentions in the endnotes, given the huge scale of migrant workers vacationing during Lunar New Year). Ma is also the author of "The First Emperor's Games," which I enjoyed from Broken Stars.

"They say that during every Great Migration, Olympus gets so overcrowded that Mars tilts a few degrees further on its axis."
"Is that a joke?"
"It's a red planet joke. I guess you haven't red enough to get it," I quipped back.
...
"You never know, apparently the occurence of one night stands increases tenfold during the GM."
"Of course, but the funny thing in this joke is that during the GM, whilst you might be able to find a partner you desire for a perfect one-night stand, you'll be hard pressed to find a room."

(How common is "whilst" in UK English, compared to "while"? I felt like the "whilst" per page count density was out of control, but that might just be my US dialect talking.)

"Flower of the Other Shore," by A Que, is a very humorous, meta, and occasionally fourth-wall breaking story about zombies. The narrator is a zombie, and his "who am I, what am I doing here" amnesia is reminiscent of "Project Hail Mary," in a good way. Zombies lose their powers of speech, but have innate sign-language skills.

Just as we are half fighting with instinct, and half talking nonsense, the thin man who was bitten gets to his feet, his body rigid, and starts charging towards the crowd: eyes blood-red, teeth bared. The blood from the wound on his throat has already darkened and begun to congeal.
"Hello, I'm new," he signals to me in a friendly manner. "What are the rules on this side?"
"Don't run in front of a--" I begin warning, but before I can finish signing "gun", the barrel of a Gatling gun sweeps towards him, its stream of high caliber rounds tearing him into two.

Spoilers: our narrator is not like other zombies.

"Shut your mouth!" the captain roars at me.
But I couldn't. "You don't understand, when you lose something for so long and finally get it back, you cherish it even more, like love and health, like your voice. When I became a Stiff, the first part of my body to go permanently stiff was--don't look at me like that, I mean my vocal cords. Rigor mortis set in, and I could only talk with hand signals. But the voice is a gift of gods, the cry of beasts, the chirping of birds, the rustle of the wind and the splash of waves of the sea, each with their own music. Besides, if I want to be with someone, I can actually tell her that I love her, and oh, Captain, has anyone ever told you they loved you? Ah...ah, judging by your face, that's a no.... doesn't matter, doesn't matter, there's still time, before you become a Stiff too... Don't hit me! Don't hit me!..."

Bingo: Translated, 5+ Short Stories, Author of Color, does One-Word Title count if there's a subtitle? "Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction."

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(SFF Bingo): Isles of the Emberdark, by Brandon Sanderson

2026-04-13T02:33:44Z

New year, new bingo, let's go!

The planet "First of the Sun" has historically been low-tech. While most people live on the "homeisles," there are a few who travel to the Pantheon archipelago, where everything from insects to trees to sea monsters to dinosaur-like land monsters can and will kill you. Sixth of the Dusk is a trapper, one of these brave souls. Trappers spend their days doing things like trying to sic poisonous rodents on their rivals, although Dusk thinks that might be a little unnecessary.

Most people in "First of the Sun" have magical companion birds called the Aviar, most of which are parrot-like, which can grant them magical powers. At first I was like, okay, nice made-up fantasy-world name. Only on page 72 was it like, the places where the Aviar are raised are called...Aviaries. Lol.

However, once interstellar travelers called the "Ones Above" make contact, technological progress comes quickly. Dusk finds his traditional way of life becoming outdated, and struggles to find a fulfilling vocation, while the planet in general tries to avoid being colonized and made puppets of the newcomers. A lot of the plot revolves around different people patronizing or belittling Dusk in various ways, and pushing back against the "noble savage" trope. Vathi is a homeisler:

"We could kill them all," Dusk said. He rushed over to Vathi, taking her with his right hand, the arm that wasn't wounded. "With those weapons, we could kill them all. Every nightmaw. Maybe even the shadows, too!"
"Well, yes, it has been discussed. However, they are important parts of the ecosystem on these lands. Removing the apex predators could have undesirable results."
"Undesirable results?" Dusk ran his hand through his hair. "They'd be gone. All of them! I don't care what other problems you think it would cause. They would all be dead!"
Vathi snorted, picking up the lantern and stamping out the small fires it had started. "I thought trappers were connected to nature."
"We are. That's how I know we would all be better off without any of these things."
"You are disabusing me of many romantic notions about your kind, Dusk," she said, circling the dying beast.

And Dajer is one of the "Ones Above":

"I like you, Sixth," Dajer said. "I like your bluntness. Your uncivilized, simple sense of pure morality."
Did Dajer...think people were honest because they were less advanced in technology? Did he think that people on Dusk's planet were somehow nicer than ones from the stars?
It was an incredibly stupid perspective. It stood out in this man, who was otherwise so calculating and expert at maneuvering conversations. This flaw in Dajer was like a long scratch, leaking water, in an otherwise well-crafted hull.
But Dusk supposed everyone had their flaws; that was part of what made them people. And not...beings from some story, with an "uncivilized, simple sense of pure morality." Dajer had exposed a weakness to be exploited; Dusk could only hope that he had not unwittingly done the same thing.

The first section alternates between the "present day" and "five years ago," the latter being the narrative originally contained in the standalone novella "Sixth of the Dust." I had read that many years ago in a collection of Sanderson short fiction, but remembered basically none of it, so it was good to have the refresher, and I thought the interweaving of Dusk and Vathi in the present and retracing their steps in the past was handled well without being gimmicky.

There's another POV character who shows up in the prologue and reappears in the second part; Starling, an eighty-seven-year-old dragon (that's young in dragon years) who is in exile from her own people, now shapeshift-trapped in human form indefinitely, and living on a spaceship with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits from elsewhere in the Cosmere. Like with "The Sunlit Man," there are so many callbacks/allusions to other Cosmere books that it's sometimes overstimulating for those of us who are trying to remember "wait, do we know so-and-so?" and I'm not sure how it would land for someone not familiar with the wider series. A non-comprehensive list, under spoiler cut:

( Read more... )

I liked this part, and it'll be funnier if you know Mistborn:

"Quite upsetting of the Scadrians, claming someone else's homeworld, but you know how they are. Rusting this! Rusting that! I scowl and throw coins in your face!"
"Don't you literally worship a Scadrian?" Nazh asked.
"That's different," Ed said. "He is nice."

But if you've read "Tress" and the "plucky crew rallying together behind their cheerful and optimistic captain," a lot of it is going to feel familiar. So this part was less gripping for me.

The running joke is that, in Dusk's POV, he regularly points out "that wasn't a direct question, so he wasn't obliged to answer." Starling's impression:

What a curious man. It was like...he knew the rules of ordinary conversation, but chose to live outside them, like a verbal conscientious objector.

And even by the end, when he's changed a lot:

Of course, the bones did not reply. He liked that about bones.

I'm currently in a mood where it's like "every time we come across a quote that makes me emotional about polar exploration in a book that has less than nothing to do with polar exploration, take a shot:"

"Coming here was a disaster."
"Yes."
He turned to her.
"Yes," she continued, this whole expedition will likely be a disaster, a disaster that takes us a step closer to our goal."
He checked Sisisru next, working by the light of the now-rising moon. "Foolish."
Vathi folded her arms before her on the roof of the building, torso still disappearing into the lit square of the trapdoor below. "Do you think that our ancestors learned to wayfind on the oceans without experiencing a few disasters along the way? Or what of the first trappers?"

It does stick the landing well, with hope for a brighter future for First of the Sun in general, and for Dusk--Sanderson is good at adding a line or two to assure us that the meaningful friendships which have been built won't be completely abandoned, even in a new era!

Bingo: perfect fit for Explorers/Rangers (hard mode), also Published in 2026, Politics. Technically Starling could qualify as Older Protagonist, and if you want even more of a technicality, non-human protagonist, but in both cases I suspect we can do a lot better in terms of the spirit of the square.

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In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov

2026-03-29T22:36:48Z

In 1912, the Saint Anna, led by Lieutenant Brusilov, sets out for the Northeast Passage (it's like the Northwest Passage but less interesting), which has been navigated once before; he's mostly interested in hunting walrus and polar bear, etc. They get iced in and drift north for over a year. Albanov, the navigator, is "dismissed from duty" in late 1913 (but is stuck on the ship with everyone else). Early in 1914 he asks to venture south on his own, to avoid being stuck in another winter. About half the crew volunteers to come with him. Most of his party makes it to the Franz Josef Archipelago to the south, but as they're moving east across the archipelago, people get sick or the party just gets split; only Albanov and Alexander Konrad survive. They get picked up by another Russian polar vessel that's also been out of touch for two years, and when they get back, they have to be informed WWI has started. Albanov kept a diary of his trek, and wrote this up in 1917 using that as a basis; he died two years later, from either typhoid or an exploding munitions boxcar (the Russian Revolution was a fun time).

They had to make their own sledges and kayaks before setting off, because Brusilov didn't have any of that kind of stuff, and Albanov spends a lot of time yelling at the guys not to just leave them behind and go on skis, we actually need these to navigate, fools. I can sort of visualize loading kayaks on sledges to cross ice, but lashing sledges to the kayaks to cross the water gaps is impressive! (Later he talks more about "we lashed them on crosswise," but it was hard for me to visualize at first. They start with five sledges and also five kayaks that take turns riding on each other, it's not five sledge-cum-kayak-vehicles.)

Albanov was definitely a member of the Fridtjof Nansen fan club; they have basically no books on the Saint Anna, but they do have a map of Nansen's travels from "Farthest North." He and Johansen had approached the Franz Josef Archipelago from the east (rather than from the west like Albanov), Albanov is trying to find the supplies where they'd made camp, in the middle.

There's one woman on the Saint Anna, Yerminiya Zhdanko. She was originally hired as a nurse, and apparently took very good care of Brusilov during his illness, but also is the crew's "hostess" at meals. Is this just men defaulting to "oh of course the woman will be doing the ~feminine~ jobs"?

Denisov, a harpooner who stays with the Saint Anna, gets about as much biographical background as anyone. He "was half Ukrainian and half Norwegian." But because this is a Russian narrator writing in 1917, Denisov's father's home is in "the Ukraine," oof.

There's probably a spectrum to draw rating all the expedition leader+second-in-command dynamics. But Brusilov is new levels of awful. His POV on the crew asking to leave:

"At first I tried to talk them out of their plan...A small but increasing number of them decided to stay, more than I actually would have liked, but I did not want to force anyone to leave."

AKA our supplies are so limited, he needs some of the crew to leave so the remaining supplies will go farther, and then too many people stayed back with him.

And here's Albanov shortly before their departure:

Late in the evening the lieutenant called me once more into his cabin to give me a list of items we would be taking with us and which I must, if possible, return to him at a later date. Here is that list as it was entered into the ship's record: 2 Remington rifles, 1 Norwegian hunting rifle, 1 double-barreled shotgun, 2 repeating rifles, 1 ship's log transformed into a pedometer for measuring distances covered, 2 harpoons, 2 axes, 1 saw, 2 compasses, 14 pairs of skis, 1 first-quality malitsa, 12 second-quality malitisi [a footnote explains that malitisi are sacklike garments used in lieu of sleeping bags], 1 sleeping bag, 1 chronometer, 1 sextant, 14 rucksacks, and 1 small pair of binoculars.
Brusilov asked me if he had forgotten to list anything. His pettiness astounded me.

Albanov's general tone throughout (and I guess this is feasible to put into print if all but one of your comrades are dead) is "why am I surrounded by idiots, you are all so lazy, don't sleep, get up and start sledging." But when they leave someone behind who's dying and unable to be carried, he sends a sledge to go back for him. He says that he's become more religious; he carries an icon of Saint Nicholas, and has a dream of him that he interprets as miraculous.

As they're marching across the ice, two guys steal a bunch of supplies on the guise of a "scouting expedition" and disappear. Albanov is furious, but reasons that they can't waste time trying to track them down. A week later, they reach land, it's great, there is fresh food and flowers and everything is wonderful. Turns out the thieves are also there.

My inner voice whispered the oath I had taken to "shoot the ignominous thieves on the spot if ever I encountered them." Anger rose up inside me again. Then I took a closer look at the fellow: He was truly pitiful and his pleas went straight to the heart. I thought of the miracle that had delivered us from an icy death and how I had just now so deeply felt the beauty of the earth and of life, like thought someone brought back from the dead. Swayed by the overwhelming power of such emotions, I decided to pardon the man. Yet had I met him only a few hours earlier, on the ice, I would most certainly have executed him, which alone could expiate his crime.

(But also, Albanov never mentions the names of the two miscreants. Was one of them the one who survived?)

You know how some people really bond together and become friends while facing ordeals together? Yeah nope:

During the most critical moments I was always essentially alone, and it was then that I understood the profound truth of the precept: "It is when you are alone that you are free. If you want to live fight for as long as you have strength and determination. You may have no one to help you with your struggle, but you will at least have no one dragging you under. When you are alone, it is always easier to stay afloat."

I mean, personally, I've definitely...been there. It's just odd to find that expressed as a precept. Maybe it's a Russian thing.

Worsley when they're almost to Elephant Island :handshake meme: Albanov when they're almost to Northbrook Island
not like this, we're so freaking close

During that brief instant, every stage of our journey flashed vividly through my mind with the speed of lightning. I saw the deaths of our three comrades; I saw Lunayev and Shpakovsky carried away in the midst of the storm, and finally myself and Konrad about to be drowned. I can remember exactly what I was thinking: "Who will ever know how we died?" "No one!" I told myself. The idea that no one would ever know how we had fought against these indominable elements, and that our end would remain a mystery forever, was an unspeakable torture to me. My last ounce of strength rebelled against such an unsung disappearance.

Illness triggers the third man factor:

I also had persistent nightmares and imagined that there were three of us on the island. During these mild hallucinations I would get up and hurry over to my sole companion, busy with his excavations, and ask about our third comrade without even knowing who it might be.

But shortly after this, the narrative starts switching between a last-name and a first-name basis for Alexander. :)

The footnotes are detailed and useful, so is the index. (Every time he uses the phrase "white death," take a shot.)

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Tent Life in Siberia, by George Kennan

2026-03-28T01:20:22Z

A little downtime between bingo years, and kind of figured "the only way out is through" when it comes to being weird about polar exploration fandom, so...wandered around a used bookstore and picked up some random titles that looked interesting, there may be more where this came from.

Expedition: the 1865-67 Russian-American Telegraph Company. People had tried to lay a telegraphic cable under the Atlantic Ocean, it didn't last, so another company was like "what if we go up the North American west coast, across the Bering Strait*, then across all of Russia and connect up with the existing telegraph system in Moscow?" So this was part of the exploration/research/preliminary scouting for that. It kind of ends abruptly with "okay never mind, they got the Atlantic Ocean route working after all, let's stop," but hey, that's just capitalism.

This is more of a humorous travelogue with lots of droll tongue-in-cheek, culture shock, wedding-crashers type stuff. Seasickness:

Mahood pretends that he is all right, and plays checkers with the captain with an air of assumed tranquillity which approaches heroism, but he is observed at irregular intervals to go suddenly and unexpectedly on deck, and to return every time with a more ghastly and rueful countenance. When asked the object of these periodic visits to the quarter-deck, he replies, with a transparent affectation of cheerfulness, that he only goes up "to look at the compass and see how she's heading." I am surprised to find that "looking at the compass" is attended with such painful and melancholy emotions as those expressed in Mahood's face when he comes back; but he performs the self-imposed duty with unshrinking faithfulness, and relieves us of a great deal of anxiety about the safety of the ship. The Captain seems a little negligent, and sometimes does not observe the compass once a day; but Mahood watches it with unsleeping vigilance.

(When my grandpa was writing up his recollections of his military experience, decades after the fact, he had some creative euphemisms for seasickness too, maybe this is just a travel literature staple.)

Many of the place names and Russian loanwords didn't have their spelling standardized by this point. Stuff like "yourt" and "toondra" are always in scare quotes, ditto his spelling for balalaika and sastrugi (which is admittedly not a super common word unless you're in polar nonsense fandom...) *And the body of water between Asia and North America is "Behring's Straits" at this point. Early on he complains about Russian transliteration, why is there a "W" in "Wrangell" [Island] or "Wladimir," why would you want to spell this province name "Kamtchatka," nobody pronounces the first "T." So that aged well! (Most of my knowledge of Kamchatka comes from playing, or at least setting up, games of Risk with my brother, who had a line about 'Kamchatka will never forgive you!!')

The word I wish they'd had a translation or gloss for is "verst," which I wasn't familiar with. A verst is 1.07 kilometers, or about 2/3 of a mile.

Nitpick: there are maps in the endpapers, which is great, but it's very zoomed out, a lot of it is the proposed route of the telegraph across the rest of Russia, and the map goes as far south as India and the Arabian Peninsula. Would have been better zoomed in on the area that's actually the focus, but maybe a lot of the smaller settlements didn't have their coordinates mapped...

Obviously Kennan is not a professional anthropologist so take the cultural observations with a grain of salt. I thought the contrast between "the nomads' culture can seem kind of ruthless and harsh to us, but that's a byproduct of the circumstances under which they live, they're as honest and hospitable as anyone else" versus "their cousins who live in settlements are just the worst, most lazy, and terrible" was an interesting parallel to the worldbuilding in cultures like the Outskirters from the Steerswoman series. The details of "these people live in their summer habitations for three months, damming up the river and catching lots of salmon, then go back to their winter village for most of the year," and "the central government of Russia is trying to tax people's fishing harvests so that they have insurance for years when there isn't a good catch" also seem like neat worldbuilding concepts. Maybe for future origfic.

One evening, soon after we left Shestakova, they [dogsled drivers] happened to see me eating a pickled cucumber, and as this was something which had never come within the range of their limited gastronomical experience, they asked me for a piece to taste. Knowing well what the result would be, I gave the whole cucumber to the dirtiest, worst-looking vagabond in the party, and motioned to him to take a good bite. As he put it to his lips his comrades watched him with breathless curiosity to see how he liked it. For a moment his face wore an expression of blended surprise, wonder, and disgust which was irresistibly ludicrous, and he seemed disposed to spit the disagreeable morsel out; but with a strong effort he controlled himself, forced his features into a ghastly imitation of satisfaction, smacked his lips, declared it was "akhmel nemélkhin"--very good, and handed the pickle to his next neighbor. The latter was equally astonished and disgusted with its unexpected sourness, but, rather than admit his disappointment and be laughed at by the others, he also pretended that it was delicious, and passed it along. Six men in succession went through with this transparent farce with the greatest solemnity; but when they had all tasted it, and all been victimized, they burst out into a simultaneous "ty-e-e-e" of astonishment, and gave free expression to their long-suppressed emotions of disgust. The vehement spitting, coughing, and washing out of mouths with snow, which succeeded this outburst, proved that the taste for pickles is an acquired one, and that man in his aboriginal state does not possess it. What particularly amused me, however, was the way in which they imposed on one another. Each individual Korak, as soon as he found that he had been victimized, saw at once the necessity of getting even by victimizing the next man, and not one of them would admit that there was anything bad about the pickle until they had all tasted it. "Misery loves company," and human nature is the same all the world over.

There's also a description of "Anadyr sickness" that's especially common in women, and that's really intriguing in light of what our culture would describe as "mass psychogenic illness." Low temperatures are survivable, but wind is a drag; nobody associates Siberia with mosquitoes, but mosquitoes suck. Many of the cultural allusions went over my head, but hey, he would probably say the same thing about our literature. There are a lot of John Franklin jokes. The Eastern Orthodox liturgy is very moving and they sing Christmas carols too.

A ball at the house of a priest on Sunday night struck me as implying a good deal of inconsistency, and I hesitated about sanctioning so plain a violation of the fourth commandment. Dodd, however, proved to me in the most conclusive manner that, owing to difference in time, it was Saturday in America and not Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure, and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigators," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and couldn't have told for my life whether it was to-day in America or yesterday, or when a Siberian Sunday did begin. I finally concluded that as the Russians kept Saturday night, and began another week at sunset on the Sabbath, a dance would perhaps be sufficiently innocent for that evening. According to Siberian ideas of propriety it was just the thing.

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Very minor spoilers for "Project Hail Mary" (book and movie)

2026-03-22T02:36:22Z

( link contains actual spoilers, this is not really spoilery )

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vicious circle?

2026-03-14T03:14:15Z

Maybe I'm on the threshold of being able to articulate some new facet of the problem that I haven't been able to express before, or maybe it's all the same noise.

( tldr )

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Dear Author (Sufficiently Advanced 2026)

2026-03-10T19:24:38Z

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms. Treats are enabled.

Note for this particular exchange: I hope to be traveling at the time gifts are revealed, I may not be able to comment promptly. I look forward to savoring my gift when I have time to sit at a computer and read!

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

Anathem

Pre-Contact Mathic Life

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution

Pre-Contact Mathic Life:

I love all the weird math monk stuff. Patterns for bells and sleeping arrangements! Clock towers! Labyrinths between the different tiers! Everything the Ita are doing behind the scenes to make it functional! Anything set in the world of the concents would be great. It sounds like Saunt Edhar's is more ascetic than some of the other concents, so something set elsewhere with different traditions could be a neat contrast.

The Dictionary After the Second Reconstitution:

What's going to happen post-canon as people react to new jargon from the Daban Arnud? Weird/nonsensical multilingual puns that make no sense? What languages do people speak with each other on the Daban Arnud? Were there Millennials patiently waiting to add their neologisms and then oops, aliens? Do the avout incorporate any vocabulary from the saeculars, or do they still consider that a corrupting influence?

Paradises Lost
WB: Any

What a fascinating story! The contrasts between how the Zeroes feel that they might be depriving their descendants of something important, and the descendants' awareness of their own good fortune, are powerful. "History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again." Guh. And the commentary about "noble lies" being condescending and potentially as dangerous as fundamentalism was really well done. Anything in this setting would be fascinating, with canon characters and/or OCs.

I'd be interested in any other traditions similar to the way religion develops on the ship--things arising to respond to societal issues, and then over the generations, growing and evolving into something the Zero generation couldn't have predicted.

More about the dynamics of family units, motherchildren versus fatherchildren? What considerations do people take in choosing someone else to reproduce with?

Some of the missing scenes? How do we get from "Luis arguing about religion" to "Luis gets elected council leader" so quickly?

Future communication with earth? Do other ships eventually arrive on the new planet? What traditions have developed by that point?

Project Hail Mary

Steve Hatch

I love Steve and how faith and science complement each other for him. Ryland kind of lampshades "you're the most optimistic guy I've ever met," which is saying something by the standards of an Andy Weir novel. More about his optimism in dark times? He seems very confident in his belief that the Beatles are just objectively the best musicians; more of his unshakable takes? Is he still alive by the time of the Beatle (spaceships)' return, and if so, what does he make of them? How does he incorporate the discovery of Eridians into his worldview?

Remembrance of Earth's Past

Cheng Xin
Yang Dong
Ye Wenjie

Cheng Xin:

A fix-it where she doesn't miss Yun Tianming at their star? Any kind of outside POV on her and the many different hats she wears: Older men patronizing her during Project Staircase? The humans resenting her in Australia? Luo Ji and the museum? What if she'd stayed on the cylinder worlds near Jupiter where things felt "normal" and 2000s-y? Her relationship with Guan Yifan--is he really a different kind of human for having been to space, or are they more two sides of the same coin?

Yang Dong:

For someone who has very little time "on screen," she casts a long shadow over all of the books. More about her friendship with the programmer from "Death's End," and/or with Luo Ji? What if she'd survived--what would she have made of her mother's betrayal? How would things have gone with Ding Yi?

Ye Wenjie:

Secrets at Red Coast Base? Some more of the "declassified" documents? The early days of the ETO? What did she work out about Dark Forest theory before meeting Luo Ji? What if Yang Dong had talked to her about the documents she'd sneaked a look at? Or if Ye had lived long enough to discover more of Deterrence theory herself?

Steerswoman
WB: Any
Bel & or / Rowan

I was thrilled by the worldbuilding in this series--the depiction of Rowan's scientific inquiry is great, even if our perspective as readers is different from the characters'. And I especially enjoyed the complexity of Outskirter society in "Steerswoman's Road"--the tribes closer to the Inner Lands growing more militaristic and less cultured, the Face People and Efraim's weirdness around women, the naming ceremony and recitation of ancestors, the importance of poetry and lore--that makes them much more than "wilderness raiders."

There are lots of great tropey moments with Bel and Rowan that can be either shippy or gen: huddling for warmth, teaching each other swordplay, taking care of each other when they get dysentery! If you're so inclined, I'd be interested to see a shippy expansion on any of these, or something else along these lines. Another misunderstanding with the courtship gifts outside the tent?

Something more worldbuilding-focused elsewhere in the world would also be neat--documents at the Archives? Steerswomen and wizards' POV on the same events? What does religion look like in a world where Christian symbols and language exist but most people don't remember their homeworld? (I'd prefer no authorial bashing of any specific belief system or lack thereof, but canon-typical disagreements/skepticism on different characters' part is fine and expected!)

Crossover Fandom:

Sazed (Mistborn) & Taravangian (Stormlight Archive)
They both control two Shards now--Sazed's seem like inherent opposites, Taravangian's don't. What happens when they meet? Taravangian tries to talk Sazed into letting Taravangian combine more shards for the greater good? Sazed turns Taravangian's logic against him? Could they meet in some kind of pocket universe/Cognitive Realm nonsense/AU setting where their immense powers don't really come into play and it's just the two guys bickering at each other?

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(SFF Bingo): The Bone Ships, by RJ Barker

2026-03-10T19:10:49Z

Last bingo square: "Generic Title," title needs to contain one of a handful of cliche words, including "Bone" as an option. After a false start, tracked down this, the first in a trilogy.

The world of the Scattered Archipelago is almost all ocean, and there's a lot of seafaring. There's an ongoing war between the Hundred Islands and the Gaunt Islands, with both sides accusing the others of kidnapping children and forcing them into slavery or human sacrifice, but it's been going on so long that the beginning has probably been forgotten. Ships have historically been constructed from the bones of arakeesians (water dragons), but they're almost extinct now, so maybe the war will fizzle out because of lack of weapons?

This was a good example of indirect worldbuilding through language choice. The captain of a ship is generically "shipwife" and the disciplinary officer is "deckmother" (regardless of their actual sex); the default for generic person is always "woman or man" (rather than "man or woman"); ships are referred to as "he," a generic form of bravado is "tits" (where our world might use "balls"), etc. Not tendentious, but a good example of how background language subtly reflects how the characters, and the readers, view society.

There is also some interesting worldbuilding going on around the nonhuman creatures in the world. A ship can get magically-boosted wind speed/direction through the help of its "gullaime," a birdlike creature with magical powers, and the gullaimes seem to be related to the arakeesians in some fashion. But humans' exploitation of the gullaimes is basically slavery plus brutal eye trauma. It's strongly implied that the only reason our protagonists' ship is able to survive when others wouldn't is because they have an especially strong gullaime, or maybe just one that's been mutilated less than typical.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really invested in the POV character. Joron Twiner, nineteen, has been condemned to the "black ships" (crewed by criminals with lingering death sentences) after a miscarriage of justice. A young aristocrat killed his father in, essentially, a drunken vehicular accident (I liked this twist just because it was so mundane and, in a sad way, reflective of our world). Joron got his revenge in a duel, but due to the very hierarchical classist/ableist society, was criminialized anyway via a miscarriage of justice. Before the book begins, he was briefly made shipwife of his own ship, the "Tide Child" just because he wasn't part of any existing faction, and drinks away his days.

Then "Lucky" Meas Gilbryn shows up. A formidable shipwife and daughter of the ruler of the lands, she's been sentenced to the black ships nevertheless, and begins whipping everybody into shape on "Tide Child." Joron is demoted to "deckkeeper" (second-in-command), and basically we're just watching from his point of view as she delivers a bunch of training montages, etc.

I can see how, if Meas is the most active, taking-agency character, you might not want the entire story to be from her POV--she could come off as too overpowered. But Joron is even less interesting. It's not clear why she keeps him as her #2, he's mostly just along for the ride, and sometimes to play good cop to her bad cop. And then there's a Goblin Emperor-esque theme developing of "I can never be friends with these people, just their officer, oh well." Even when he occasionally shows agency, jumping into a fight, he doesn't know why he's doing it: "He almost brought his hand to his mouth upon saying it, he was so shocked by his own words."

At first we're told that Joron resents Meas for "taking" his job, even though he doesn't really do anything with it, and sort of led to believe that his alcoholism will become a problem. But that just fizzles out. There's a lot of one-liner italicized flashbacks to "as my father used to say" or to his father's death, but it doesn't really add anything. And maybe there's supposed to be a plotline around him overcoming cowardice, but I don't feel like his actions are that strange or unusual, everybody has a self-preservation instinct even on a ship of people condemned to death.

Meas does a lot of "who's with me? Are you with me?" "yes we're with you, shipwife" "I can't hear you, are you with me???" "Yes Shipwife!" "Say it louder" "YES SHIPWIFE" "okay, good, let's go." I find this kind of audience-participation thing patronizing, I don't need to see it in fiction.

The text tries to depict the horrors of war via "hurry up and wait" themes and repetition. As realistic as it is, I'm not sure it pays off in prose. Joron felt anxious. And then the enemy ship drew closer. The parrot said some curse words. And then the enemy ship drew closer. Meas adjusted her lucky hat. And then the enemy ship drew closer. We get it.

On a sentence level, it didn't seem to be very well edited, there are various runaway sentences and dangling modifiers:

"It did not take long for Tide Child, carried on the strange magic of the windtalker, which cooed to itself as it worked, for the ship’s lookouts to get a clearer look at the flukeboats."

"Solemn Muffaz nodded to Gavith, who ran to the bell on the rail at the fore of the rump of the ship." There's nothing wrong with this sentence but I feel like five consecutive prepositional phrases (of the exact same word/letter count) is too much.

When it comes to Call A Rabbit a Smeerp, everyone's threshold is different, but the sun, moon, and stars are, respectively, personified as the Eye, Blind Eye, and Bones of Skearith the Godbird. Every time. Characters get "eyeburned" instead of "sunburned." For me, personally, this was unnecessary and distracting.

Meas' backstory was intriguing. Hundred Islands culture places a strong value on childbirth and healthy babies; if a mother survives her first delivery and the baby has no birth defects, it's sacrified to become a magical "ghostlight" for the non-black ships. But Meas survived this ritual because the gods (Maiden, Mother, and Hag instead of Crone) didn't want her, hence the "Lucky" epithet. Meas' mother had twelve more children, which, as the most prolific matriarch on the islands, makes her the ruler. But Meas got sentenced to the black ships anyway. Is that because she's secretly working to end the war once and for all? Or some other kind of treachery?

This and the worldbuilding were compelling, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in seeking out two more books from Joron's POV. There's a lot of "oh well, we will probably all die, but we've been sentenced to death anyway so let's just do our duty," but after a few quick deaths of named characters in the early chapters, most of the book comes and goes without the stakes or tension feeling earned.

Bingo: Generic Title, could also count for Pirates, previous Readalong. Maybe Down with the System?

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Dear Pen Pal (Unsent Letters 2026)

2026-02-28T19:36:06Z

Hello, thank you for creating for me! I'm also primeideal on Ao3. Treats are enabled.

Note for this particular exchange: I hope to be traveling at the time gifts are revealed, I may not be able to comment promptly. I look forward to savoring my gift when I have time to sit at a computer and read!

DNWs:

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics

-themes of cynicism or futility, or that the (canon's) main plotlines "are for nothing"

Dune Movies

Chani & Liet

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

Chani doesn't have a last name in movie canon, so if you're working just from the movies--what relationship do these two have? Something comparing and contrasting their relationships to Fremen religion/prophecy/fate versus free will, or interactions with the empire, could be neat. Scientific articles that Liet writes? Is she training Chani as a successor?

Alternatively: in book canon, Liet is Chani's father, suggesting that movie!Liet could be Chani's mother, which adds another layer of delicious wrinkles to everything. Letters they write when Liet is away on empire business? Is Chani curious or resentful about her family elsewhere in the galaxy? What hopes does Liet have for Chani, even if they never leave the pages of her journal?

Stormlight Archive

Shallan & any

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

I think there's a lot of potential for correspondence in the post-canon era, with Shallan trying to communicate via seons from the Cognitive Realm. Worrying about Adolin? Theorizing with Navani or Jasnah as to what this might mean for the Radiants? Mentoring Gaz or some of her other squires remotely? Negotiating with Thaidakar? (I'm familiar with the rest of the Cosmere if you want to work in characterization/worldbuilding from other Cosmere books.) Trying to track down her family?

If you're interested in Shallan/Adolin, feel free to make it shippy, but I'm not interested in poly-shipping for this request. I subscribe to (and enjoy) the theory that Shallan is pregnant when we see her last, so I'd be happy with an OC kid showing up, but no need to include that if it's not something you're interested in.

It would also be neat to see more from Shallan's journals/sketchbooks/research during canon. Assignments she completed for Jasnah in Kharbranth? More of the spanreed notes from when she was "texting" Adolin in his self-imposed jail term? Research articles about the Radiants or Unmade?

I'm not super interested in Shallan's alter egos, so I'd prefer if they weren't a focus (mentions are fine).

Worst Journey

Birdie & Cherry & Wilson, Birdie/Cherry

(Formats: Books/Articles, Journals/Diaries, Letters/Emails/Audio/Video transcripts)

I love the contrast of all the different character voices--not just narrator!Cherry writing a decade after the fact, but also diary!Cherry in the moment and epistolary!Bowers being very proud of his cute green hat. Maybe another incident with different POVs on the same event, whether it be future!Cherry interweaving his voice with present!Cherry or just the contrast between different voices in people's respective diaries/letters home? (Doesn't have to be limited to the requested characters, outside POV from other crew is also great!) Letters they wrote to each other after the return party turned back, for dramatic irony and sadness?

For the tag "books and articles" in particular I'm imagining canon-divergence AUs. Everyone lives and Wilson gets to write nerdy research papers about the penguin eggs? The Winter Journey ends in tragedy, and maybe that changes the approach the polar party takes? Atkinson leads the group to search for Campbell's party in late 1912 and the world doesn't find out for years (or ever?) how close Scott et. al got? (Any of these premises could also work for other formats, of course!)

As usual, all of this is optional, anything about these fandoms/relationships will be great. Thanks for creating for me!

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I'm gonna rise to glory in/my stainless steel DeLorean

2026-02-28T02:35:34Z

I had read a few reviews of "Back to the Future: the musical" when it opened on Broadway, and the reviews boiled down to: 1. the DeLorean is great, 2. they tried really hard to stay faithful to the movie and not cut anything important, but they also added a bunch of songs, so it's lengthy, 3. reviewer didn't care much for the movie because it didn't flatter their preconceptions, and the musical isn't any better, we have to be more edgy instead of just nostalgia bait. I figured 2 and 3 would not be big drawbacks for me, and it was in Baltimore, so sure.

It was...fine? I didn't dislike it in an "didn't flatter my ideological preconceptions" way, but the intro felt rushed (trying to establish Marty's siblings as characters, over-the-top hamming, etc.) This is just based on the original movie, not the sequels.

Anyway, here are some things that I think they could have done differently, especially because it's an adaptation. I'm not sure I'd necessarily enjoy all of these, just things that might be interesting to try.

Arguably the relationship at the core of the movie is Marty & Doc's friendship! Let them sing a duet together!
The character of Jennifer (Marty's girlfriend) could easily be cut. At the end of the movie it's like "come quick, your kids are in trouble!" and then that actress didn't want to do the sequels, so they just...awkwardly wrote her out. Jennifer in the musical doesn't do anything useful either.
I understand that we kind of need Marty's siblings to set up the photo as a symbol of temporal paradoxing, but again, they just showed up in the intro song to establish one-note characterizations, then were different in the alternate timeline of the ending. I feel like the first few scenes in 1985 could have been more streamlined/less ludicrous "And Now We Are Breaking Into Song" moments.
Doc has a song called "For the Dreamers," where he talks about his scientific heroes--he has pictures of Edison and EInstein on his wall, etc. But he's also like "yeah, some people fail a thousand times before they get it right, some people just...fail a thousand times." IDK, I kind of like the idea, but the execution of "the people who weren't successes matter too" could have been better.
The lampshading of "don't tell me about the future, I don't want to know, don't create a paradox" being resolved with "oh what the hell" is underwhelming plotwise. Maybe an adaptation where Doc actually dies? Or instead of Marty getting the message to him, someone like Mayor Wilson or Biff inadvertently changes the future based on Marty's meddling?
Sometimes people interpret the ending as fridge horror--Marty is the only person who remembers his original timeline, his family can't understand why he's not "their" Marty, etc. What if instead it doesn't change, but Marty is like, "hey, Dad, did you ever write science fiction books?" or something. Then we learn that George has been keeping up his hobby the whole time, he's just too embarrassed to share it with anyone, but Marty gives him a nudge to be a little more assertive in the future?
My mom's review of Wicked when we first saw it in 2008 was "this is going to be the best high school musical because both the lead roles are women and there are so many more girls than boys of high school age who want to do musical theater." What about always-a-girl AU for Marty and Doc? I like the idea of eccentric spinster Emily Brown still going by "Doc," but facing a little more side-eying/social awkwardness in Hill Valley. Is the love triangle different with girl!Marty in 1955? Does Biff flirt with her and get out of Lorraine's way? Is her alias "Victoria Secret" instead of "Calvin Klein"? :D

( Ending spoilers )

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this has nothing to do with anything but it could be antarctica vagueblogging, I guess

2026-02-25T00:04:21Z

Again, not really saying anything new here, just trying to articulate part of the problem that makes lots of sense in my head but maybe isn't obvious to everyone else...

( Read more... )

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Etymology fun times

2026-02-21T16:51:51Z

Didn't agree with everything in this article, but it had an interesting deep dive into the translation of the Biblical phrase "love your enemies"

The Greeks had at least two words for enemies. An echthros was someone hated, a personal enemy. Polemioi were the people of a city that one's own community was contending against. (The root polemos means "war.")
...
The verb form is second-person imperative. Unlike English, Greek also has a third-person imperative, which is awkward to translate. If Jesus had used it, one might translate this commandment as "Let them love enemies," or passively as "Let enemies be loved." But the commandment is addressed to you.

"Echthroi" shows up in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wind In The Door," I didn't realize that was a Biblical Greek word!

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Follow-up

2026-02-17T03:16:48Z

So for Christmas I got a cute little lunchbox with vintage baseball stickers on it, because of course. Then a week ago I misplaced my e-reader, even though I knew I had it on the train, it couldn't have gone far. I had brought the lunchbox because I wanted to store the e-reader and a new physical magazine subscription my cousin-once-removed got for me (my go-to Christmas wish list for the last couple years has been just "IDK, support some SFF short fiction markets, maybe get me a paywalled one) and some bananas for lunch for a long day of bell-ringing all in one place. You can tell where this is going.

Yes, after diligently calling the lost-and-found, uploading my "lost item" request (the e-reader is covered in a bunch of stickers I got from a Brandon Sanderson kickstarter, you'll definitely know it if you run across it!), etc. I finally checked the lunchbox again even though I had already checked it because it could not have gone far. The e-reader was standing on its side. Just pressed against the wall. Being stealthy.

So yeah, I am 100% my mother's child in some absentminded ways.

Now that that's back on track I'm continuing to have a normal and hinged amount of Antarctica feelings and/or working on speculative (?) poetry for some new calls. I get the sense that a lot of these editors like free verse a lot more than I do, so one of the poems at least will be more freeform than most of my stuff. But a lot of it winds up being blank verse/iambic pentameter because I'm just like that, apparently!

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I Regret To Inform You That I Am Once Again Back On My Penguin Bullshit

2026-02-08T23:28:10Z

[Edit to add: Last week I lost my wallet on the bus. Reported it to lost and found right away, but no luck. It wasn't stolen/no unexpected credit card transactions, just made me feel like an idiot. But I was able to start the ball rolling on getting stuff replaced, and debit card I was able to get in person rather than by mail, so that was great. I almost mentioned it in the first draft of this post but it's like...it's fine now, I'm not worried.

Then I wrote this entire post and only later did I realize I might. Have left my e-reader with all the annotations/highlights/stuff to remember I just made. On the train. aaaAAAa I will call the lost and found tomorrow but, really feeling like an idiot again. D: ]

Very close to hearing back on the thing I've been working on for the last few months. If it's a rejection I know I'll get over it eventually, but just the nerves of being on tenterhooks for the last few days.

A couple weeks ago we had a snowstorm that, while not as epic as anticipated, was still enough to require a lot of road thawing, so I got two and a half days off of work, which was great. The joke is that I make fun of people out here for not being able to drive in the snow, because where I grew up, most people can and do drive in the snow. "But you can't drive in the snow either." Right, but I also can't drive at all, so that's totally different :P

Anyway, obviously this was a good excuse to revisit "The Worst Journey in the World" and have emotions about it all over again! Maybe this time around I will even get to writing kinkmeme fills because I have a lot emotions, but it's just so hard to keep all the details/canon review stuff in my head at once...

This is probably going to repeat myself from several previous posts (see, "polar nonsense" tag), but I wanted to have it in one place:

( tl;dr )

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(SFF Bingo): Singer Distance, by Ethan Chatagnier

2026-01-28T23:34:24Z

I don't do star ratings, because it's really hard for me to sum up what does and doesn't work about a book on a one-dimensional axis. But one of the things that often comes up in these reviews is "does it stick the landing." Because sometimes my assessment would be like "boring first half, 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because it finally gets good." Or "compelling prose, 3.5 stars, rounded down because the end is a total anticlimax." This really impacts my reading experience.

Singer Distance is a book that sticks the landing. There are digressions that are less engaging than the SF stuff, like, flashbacks to the narrator's teenage years and pranks that local kids play on his dad's farm. But it all comes together in a way that I didn't see coming but then totally should have, which is the sign of doing something right. There is closure to the plot questions we have, I'm not sitting there thinking "well that was a waste." So it gets the rounding-up seal of approval that way.

Premise: the "channels" on Mars really were canals; there are intelligent Martians, and they're sometimes communicative. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Martians carve large-scale displays that Earth can see with telescopes, and correctly interpret them to be mathematical formulae. Earth responds with similarly large-scale constructions.

Within a few months a robust plurality had settled on this interpretation:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = _
Our first true message from the Martians: pop quiz, kindergartners.

But then the Martians pose something about distance that befuddles all Earth's scientists, and when nobody can formulate a response, Mars goes silent. The book begins in 1960; Rick is a grad student at MIT, and his girlfriend, Crystal, thinks she's solved the equation. They and some friends go on a road trip from Boston to the Arizona desert to broadcast their answer.

Rick is madly in love, and he proposes, but she tells him to finish his own degree and not bask in her reflected glory. Then she basically ghosts him. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Rick has to go on another cross-country road trip, this time without his buddies in tow.

There's opportunities for US regional humor:

The great thing about Oklahoma, Priya said, was that each state after it got a little better.

Just my luck, I thought--I was trying to find the love of my life and had to rely on the goodwill of a Philadelphian.

I like SF, and math, and can relate to nerdy obsessive mathematicians also having interests in music and cartography and other seemingly unrelated things, so this book was a specific recommendation to me. The flip side is, I can be more critical of things I know well. It's harder for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to "what if the way we conceptualize distance is misleading, what if there's a more meaningful sense of distance? Sometimes when you're physically close to somebody, emotionally, you're still miles away. Everything is relative, dude." That kind of faux-profundity is a hard sell.

This is the best explanation of "Singer Distance" we get, and I actually think it's a pretty good one in terms of "fake math":

Imagine a mountain range. Traditional measurement was like measuring from the base of the southernmost mountain to the base of the northernmost mountain in a straight line through the Earth, ignoring the complex topography of the thicknesses and compositions of each peak. Though she theorized that mapping the actual, exact topography of any distance was a task on par with mapping the universe, she explained how the averages could be calculated, with a detailed process that had to take into account inertial speed or acceleration, medium, and a mysterious variable the editors referred to as the Tanzer Value, but which Crystal named "Intent."
I sort of agreed with the editors, that Intent was a troublesome name for the quantity, one that both failed to help visualize how the variable operated and anthropomorphized an ineffable particle; it made distance seem subject to mood swings.

This is good. There's also a follow-up Martian message about entropy, and the humans comment, "you can't reverse the flow of a river...well actually yes you can, they literally did that in Chicago, maybe entropy isn't the whole story," which was fun. But by the time we get there there's been a lot of "how can you be so far away and I still feel so close to you??? #makesyouthink."

The discovery of intelligent Martians changes very little about Earth's history from the 1890s onwards. The world wars still happen. NASA still lands on the moon in 1969. There are eventually orbiters sent to Mars, but they abruptly lose transmission 13,000 miles away. This disinterest in alternate history makes it feel more like "litfic with SF elements" than "attractive to SF fans."

This is a small nitpick but: "She'd started college at seventeen and grad school at twenty-one. Twenty-four now, she was the youngest of us by four years."

How realistic is this? In my experience it's pretty common to begin college at 18 and, if you go directly to grad school from undergrad, start that at 22 or so. Let's say Crystal is more prodigious than her peers and skipped a grade early on. I still don't think it would be super likely to see a four year gap between her and her colleagues? Was it different for people in the sixties?

More generally, I find the dynamics of "socially awkward genius/"person who has practical and social skills" as a romance trope can be kind of tiresome. This version has a woman in the first slot and a man in the second instead of the reverse, props. But I don't think we get a compelling sense of what Crystal sees in Rick. She treats him (and other people close to her) with incredible callousness for those thirteen years. And then he's extremely forgiving, like, "I would rather have her in my life than be estranged from her for no reason, maybe she just went crazy from too much math and can't help it," but it felt unearned. Their relationship parallels the Earth-Mars one; Mars is aloof and normally doesn't bother to communicate with Earth unless Earth can solve their puzzles. Crystal says that maybe Earth just needs to change the conversational topic. In the Earth-Mars case, it might work, although Mars is destroying/turning off/ignoring their rovers, so it still might not. I'm not convinced that "the relationship between unequals" really works for Crystal and Rick, even if Crystal claims she's in awe of his practical skills.

Bingo: I'll probably use this for the "recycle a bingo square" (there's plenty that it could count for, eg, "Published in 2022," hard mode as Chatagnier's first published novel). I've been very lucky in not needing to fall back on that one yet!

If you're interested in using it for this year's card, arguments could be made for "a book in parts" (there are three parts, longer than traditional chapters, but they aren't subdivided into actual chapters). It's not dwelled on in detail, but Crystal and her parents were refugees from fascism in the WWII era, so arguably "stranger in a strange land." If you really want to stretch it, maybe "Impossible Places," because what if small distances and large distances are actually, like, indistinguishable, dude. Big spoilers:

( the bingo square is a spoiler )

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The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth

2026-01-27T15:09:32Z

( Politics is mostly 2008-era )

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The robots become slightly more self-aware

2026-01-24T03:09:25Z

Further to this, I am happy to say that I am now at 100% of sections begun and mostly complete, ahead of the deadline I was aiming for. If it's not selected, there may be future opportunities to revise/resubmit. And there will probably be a little more padding/editing to go, but the total word count won't grow by more than about 10% of the current total.

I've archive-locked a couple old posts from years ago, since I'm borrowing/rephrasing some of that content to include there. So if you see any broken links, it's probably not you, it's me.

Google Drive automatically puts it at the top of my "suggested documents" to open. Usually it was just "you last opened it January 18," but the last couple days, in the evening, it's like "you usually open it around this time," they know my daily pattern-of-life...

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(SFF Bingo): Foreigner, by CJ Cherryh

2026-01-19T01:59:30Z

I think I'd seen this series mentioned somewhere before as inspiring "A Memory Called Empire" and maybe other stuff. First contact, alien linguistics stuff, sure why not, let's try.

Cherryh mentions in a foreword for the 10th anniversary that her editor was responsible for having her include the first scenes. Interesting disparity for the "book in parts" bingo square:

Part One (15 pages): A human spaceship carrying "Earth's whole damned colonial program" gets lost in space and winds up far from where they were trying to go and has to keep searching for an inhabitable solar system.
Part Two (34 pages): 150 years later. The atevi, the local species, have some technological sophistication and recognize that the appearance of the "foreign star" has something to do with the powerful machines that have recently started tearing up the terrain. From the human POV, there was a schism between the Pilots' Guild, who want to leave the atevi planet alone and look elsewhere, versus the rest of the station, who want to land and take advantage of the hospitable climate there. The latter finally decide to land and try to force the pilots' hand, but are conscientious about trying to stay out of the atevi's way. When the atevi eventually make contact, the startled human radios back to his buddies like "please don't react with force, we're really gonna try and communicate peacefully here." I liked this part, with the alternating atevi and human POVs, and wanted more.
Part Three (358 pages): 200 years after that. Bren Cameron is the paidhi, the human ambassador/translator among the atevi, while the rest of humankind lives on an island. One day an assassin breaks into his quarters, and he's forced to take precautions and eventually evacuate. Making things worse, atevi don't really have a concept of individual fondness or friendship, so he's constantly going "I kind of like these security guards, why are they treating me as if I was a child and not telling me anything that's going on...oh wait it's dangerous to project 'like' onto them, they don't do 'like.'"

Just math-wise, the back of the book says "it had been nearly five centuries" since the original spaceship disappeared. 150+200=??? Also, there are about four million humans on the planet at the time of the main plot. How enormous was the original ship?

Atevi, especially less modern ones, are very superstitious about numerical feng shui.

The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
...
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number--but a million didn't seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue...

And if you play cards with them, they can and will count cards. I enjoyed that part.

In addition to an absence of humanlike emotions, atevi can also be literal-minded and tend not to show facial expressions. Which made for some interesting parallels with autism, with Bren as the minority POV character being frustrated at trying to communicate to people whose brains work very differently from his. Not sure how much of that I'm just projecting.

Unfortunately, it feels like a great deal of the plot is "high-ranking atevi pressure Bren into doing something, he doesn't really have a choice but to comply, and grudgingly goes along with it." Repeat for 350 pages. You can understand his feelings of being treated like a child; it's frustrating for us, too, that he doesn't get to exercise a lot of agency. Basically he's just trying to keep up with the atevi, who are much stronger and more physically durable than him, without complaining, and hoping that he'll earn their respect that way. There's a little bit of speculation as to "maybe the aiji [political leader] is just testing me." Later, when he's in the custody of more rural, conservative atevi, it's like, are they trying to assassinate him or do they just forget how flimsy humans are? If he endures their brutal treatment enough, will he eventually win them over? He tries to protect the individuals he finds himself caring about, and then people slap him in the face because Atevi Don't Do That.

The subtext is "humans tried to stay out of the way and not do a colonialism, but after the hopeful beginnings of Part II, atevi politics were so warlike and assassination-driven that war was inevitable anyway, that happened offscreen, and the paidhi system emerged in response." But for me it was kind of like...why bother. We do finally learn a little more about why specifically Bren is being jerked around now, beyond just "it's a test," but I felt like what we learned was pretty slight, compared to his overall lack of agency.

Early on the sentence-level prose style pinged me as verbose, but I didn't flag any specific examples and it wasn't particularly egregious overall. But there are lots of sections that are just pages of Bren introspecting and moping, with no other humans around to communicate with and no atevi POV to break it up. Again, I prefer a little more agency in my main characters.

Bingo: Book in Parts, I think a case could be made for "Stranger in a Strange Land."

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(SFF Bingo): Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

2026-01-09T14:40:30Z

This year the USA will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So in that spirit, I read a book published in the year of the 200th anniversary (1976), about the 500th anniversary (2276), by a British guy living in Sri Lanka.

Duncan Makenzie comes from a prominent family on Titan, the hospitable low-gravity moon of Saturn. He gets invited to Earth to give a speech at the quincentennial party. A lot of the book is kind of random worldbuilding speculation about how Titan's hydrogen would contribute to the economy of the solar system, and various touristy adventures on Earth without a lot of connective plot or characterization.

The title refers to the idea that Earth might play a role in a dispersed solar system similar to that of the capital in the ancient Roman empire; most of the other planets and moons can do their own thing, but if you really want patronage and cultural influence, you have to visit the capital. Why? Because interplanetary communication suffers from the light-speed barrier; you can't have a real-time video chat and observe the facial expressions and nonverbal communication of someone on another planet. On Earth, however, everyone can video chat with each other instantaneously, which made a one-world government inevitable (so while the USA's anniversary is an important symbolic occasion, it really doesn't function as an independent country). Man, I wish. D:

Makenzie is a clone. His grandfather, Malcolm, suffered DNA damage on a shuttle between Earth and Mars, which made it impossible for him to have a healthy child the old-fashioned way. So he cloned himself, and then his son cloned himself, yielding Duncan. Duncan plans to take advantage of the trip to Earth to have a fourth-generation kid and continue the family.

I would probably have bought "the Makenzies have DNA damage and it's not reparable, cloning is the only workaround" if it hadn't been for the "sustained between Earth and Mars" bit--like, would that have affected every cell? In an afterword to the paperback edition, Clarke admits that he's gotten pushback and criticism on this point, even though he tried to keep it vague, and winds up joining Ray Bradbury in the "sometimes you just have to run with it for artistic license" response.

There are a few nods to "hmm, creating unused embryos might have some ethical issues, is it okay to treat surrogate mothers this way...IDK let's just throw up our hands" that felt kind of underwhelming, but in the same way a lot of contemporary discourse is underwhelming. (1976 was two years before the first child was born through IVF, so this was still, just barely, SF.) More frustrating for me was the text trying to insist that the Makenzies all have other partners and stepkids who they love just as much as their biological relatives and are totally part of the family--but these characters barely get any interiority or screen time, there's a lot more emphasis on a love triangle from Duncan's teenage years that didn't carry over into long-lasting family ties. There is a twist ending to the clone plotline, but I couldn't suspend disbelief for the "oh yeah I totally love my non-biological family" part.

"[Saturn's] remaining satellites were barren aggregate of rock, overgrown snowballs, or mixtures of both. By the mid-2200s, more than forty had been discovered, the majority of them less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. The outer ones--twenty million kilometers from Saturn--all moved in retrograde orbits and were clearly temporary visitors from the asteroid belt; there was much argument as to whether they should be counted as genuine satellites at all."

Clarke underestimated that one, already we've discovered several hundred moons, some of which make people go "these are too puny they shouldn't even count'!

Presented without comment:

"And the Kennedy Center--that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but it's been given up as a bad job."

2276 people don't care about the details of 1700s-2000s technology:

"...quaint old photographs of stiffly-posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original George Washington--no, cameras hadn't been invented then)..."

More worldbuilding notes: 2200s political officials are chosen by random sortition, again one of those NationStates "crazy third option" policies. :) Earth only has four time zones now, global communication made it impossible to stick with 24. Real meat is not illegal, "yet," but manual driving has been illegal for a century.

"Though enthusiasm was not actually illegal, it was in somewhat bad taste; one should not take one's hobbies and recreations too seriously."

Why do whales make big jumps above the surface sometimes?

"Nobody really knows. It may be pure joie de vivre. It may be to impress a lady friend. Or it may be merely to get rid of parasites--whales are badly infested with barnacles and lampreys."
How utterly incongruous, thought Duncan. It seemed almost an outrage that a god should be afflicted with lice.

Great mental image! And the evocation of beings existing beside each other in massively different orders of magnitude comes up later, but mostly it's just vibes.

Duncan enjoys pentomino puzzles; in an afterword, Clarke notes that he got into them via Martin Gardner's recreational mathematics writing. (Same here.)

...when, on July 24, 1975, I appeared as a witness before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space Science (in the very building libeled and destroyed in Chapter 33!), I was able to quote extensively from Duncan's address to Congress in Chapter 41. Thus the House of Representatives' hearings now contain extracts from the Congressional Record for July 4, 2276, which should cause confusion among future historians.

Bingo: Book in Parts; Stranger in a Strange Land; LGBTQIA protagonist (Duncan comes from a culture where bisexuality is default, and "could never feel quite happy with someone whose affections were exclusively polarized toward one sex.")

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Random Christmas vacation happenings

2026-01-08T03:10:04Z

( Read more... )

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Dear Valentine (Candy Hearts 2025)

2026-01-02T20:51:30Z

Hello! Thank you for creating for me. I'm primeideal on Ao3, and I'm requesting fic for all fandoms, art for Divine Cities and Stormlight Archive. Treats are enabled on Ao3.

As always, if you already have an idea in mind for these characters/relationships, go for it! This is just a starting point. I have many previous creator request letters from which this is copy-pasted and endlessly rewritten, feel free to browse previous versions. I would be equally delighted with gifts for any of these!

General likes

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-time travel

-happy endings

-sad endings (when providing some measure of closure or melodrama; I'm fine with character death)

General art likes:

-black and white art

-bright/bold colors

-traditional or digital art

-objects that represent/are strongly associated with characters

-fantastic/speculative worldbuilding elements

-in-universe artifacts/sketches that the characters might have drawn

General art dislikes (please don't consider these binding DNWs: if your interests or preferences lie strongly along these lines then feel free.)

-pastel-heavy palettes

-deliberately wildly disproportionate/chibi-like characters

-completely non-representational art

DNWs:

-second person POV (unless canonical--see notes for "Debrief"--or in something like interactive fiction)

-eye trauma

-explicit sex (but fade-to-black or innuendo is fine), explicit depictions of genitalia in art

-underage sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics (**Marco flirts with the governor of California: fine; Marco flirts with the governor and this is a metaphor for the Newsom administration: no thanks.)

-character bashing

-cliffhanger endings (see notes for "Debrief")

Animorphs

Aftran/Cassie
Aftran & Illim
Ax & Elfangor
Ax & Tobias
Elfangor/Loren
Tobias & Loren

Aftran/Cassie, Aftran & Illim: The early days of the Peace Movement; how does Aftran decide to trust Illim (or anyone else) with the Animorphs' secret? Illim trying to stay above suspicion when Aftran is suspected/disappears? How would anything post-29 have been different if Aftran had stayed either in Cassie or elsewhere in the human world? One of the "canon AUs" (the 41 dystopia, time travel stuff) if Aftran had been there?

For the Ax-Elfangor-Tobias-Loren family stuff, feel free to mix and match, I like these characters in any combination!

Ax & Elfangor: growing up in Elfangor's shadow and resenting it? Coming to terms with Elfangor's legacy (and/or hirac delest?) post-canon? Not understanding weird human habits Elfangor picked up?

Ax & Tobias: Ax's misunderstandings about human culture? Tobias visits the Andalite homeworld with Ax post-canon? Some human developments encroach on the scoop and they have to move?

Elfangor/Loren: their time building a life on Earth. Elfangor's reaction to human tastes? How did they acquire DNA for him to morph? Are Tobias' aunt and uncle Loren's sibling(s)/that person's ex?/related to the fake husband that the Ellimist retcons in? Maybe they use the Time Matrix to go somewhere else--a new "pocket universe"? Elsewhere in the past or future of canon? Elfangor stays on Earth and they organize a human resistance as the Yeerk threat grows? Loren gets her memories back somehow (the hirac delest shows up? Something like the utzum ritual? Ellimist nonsense?)

Loren & Tobias: Loren experiences one of the canonical bad reactions to morphing (allergies, Z-Space nonsense, etc.) post-book 49 and Tobias has to help her through it? AU where she raises Tobias, maybe with memories intact, maybe not--what changes? They get back together post-canon and try to build a family?

Debrief

Robert Alderidge/George Russell

So on the one hand, RPGs can be kind of difficult to prompt for, in that everyone's playthroughs are different and will result in slightly different characterizations; on the other hand, I have so many feelings about these guys and would absolutely love any version. A retelling of your playthrough, what happened next, more backstory, fix-it, "fix-it" that makes it worse...

-I love the dramatic irony of seeing the same incidents from different POVs in the character sheets, and then trying to talk about it just makes it worse. (The Catholic Underground in Spain, Courtenay's investigation.) Anything expanding on those or another memory that they technically share but actually remember differently.

-From Alderidge's sheet: "Bykov has the distinction of being the only human on Earth, apart from George Russell, who has ever known you in any meaningful sense." What's going on with these two? How much does Bykov know about the OUC? Is there hatesex?

-Does any of this ever get declassified? How much do Dora or Jean, or the kids, ever figure out, correctly or incorrectly?

-Worldbuilding! What kind of research is the OUC (or the Soviets) doing into ghost technology? What are spirit mediums doing in other parts of the world? At rates of ~one in ten thousand, it's unlikely you'd ever run across another unless there was some effort--but there are also more people who acknowledge ghosts and auras even if they can't directly witness them.

For me, the disruptor was an important focal point of the playthrough--my version of Russell is increasingly horrified at the thought of using it on Alderidge, meanwhile, Alderidge is insisting that it's this great tool of mercy and it's not clear whether he's talking about himself. Then once my Russell admits to himself that getting Alderidge to cross over and get closure is more important to him than anything else, he gets his act together in kind of a ruthless Pascal's Wager-y way. The sense they both have of "okay well here's when I draw the line, it's different when it's you at risk" is part of what I love about this dynamic, so anything touching on that (or the disruptor in general) would be great, but obviously everyone's characterization will be different!

Feel free to lean into the shippy aspects, or not, as you prefer; I don't really want anything too anachronistic or setting-changey, but Alderidge's level of candor (or Russell's level of having-a-clue) can be anywhere on the scale, it's all good.

Note: some of the DNWs I've listed for other exchanges do not apply to this request. For instance, I think the use of second-person POV works very well in the character sheets, so I enthusiastically opt in to second-person POV fic here! (As well as first or third.) Also, go as dark as you want in terms of "possible outcomes include ghosts being destroyed forever with the disruptor, or haunting the world until they decay and lose all coherence."

Divine Cities

Ahanas/Voortya

Anything expanding on their relationship as portrayed in "City of Blades"! What does it look like to them, to their fellow Divinities, to contemporary worshipers? In-universe scholarship from people like Efrem and Shara trying to puzzle it out centuries later? Religious art combining symbols associated with both of them?

Farscape

Crais & Talyn

Aeryn & Zhaan

John & D’Argo Sun-Crichton

John/Aeryn

Moya & Pilot

Pilot & Aeryn

Crais & Talyn: Anything that leans into the tragic melodrama of canon would be great, but also, fix-it is good too. I'd especially like something that depicts Talyn as a character in his own right rather than just anxious beeping noises mediated through Crais--it doesn't necessarily have to be from his POV, but something that shows he has a POV, if that makes sense. How does Stark's temporary link with Talyn contrast with Crais' long-term bond? Does Crais explain his role in creating the hybrid program, and how does Talyn react? What does a relatively peaceful, happy day look like for them? Talyn's POV on their last couple episodes?

Aeryn & Zhaan: I love the contrasts between their backgrounds and the ways they approach problems. Anything contrasting these approaches, or where they have to earn from each other's strengths, would be cute. To what extent does Aeryn's relationship with Pilot factor into Zhaan's decision to sacrifice herself for Aeryn? How would the later seasons have been different if Zhaan had survived?

John/Aeryn, John & D'Argo Jr.: Post-canon adventures! Does D'Argo have the wormhole-making power? What does a "normal" day look like for John and Aeryn when they're not running for their lives? Do they ever return to some of the planet-of-the-week locations from canon? Contrasting POVs on canon events in the early days of their relationship?

Moya & Pilot, Pilot & Aeryn: There's no way that "our" Pilot can just be named "Pilot"--what was his identity before he bonded with Moya? What are their sensory experiences like, communicating with each other and with the crew? What's his POV on donating his DNA to save Aeryn; how does that change her? Did he vote for her to be captain in 4.6? We hear very little from Moya directly--I'd love to see something from her POV about the weird tiny aliens living inside her and the trouble they cause.

Stormlight Archive

Any Radiant & Their Spren
Dalinar/Navani
Navani/Raboniel
Renarin/Rlain
Shallan/Adolin

Any Radiant Spren: Really just...anything about the spren and their outsider POVs on humans! Syl discovering what it means to grow and change? Pattern comparing everything to math? The irony in Ivory's name and the importance of free will? Glys' relationship to Sja-anat and the free will issues there? Pattern and Testament gossiping about Shallan's love life? All the spren!

Dalinar/Navani: Outsider POV on the scandal of their relationship? Cute moments taking care of little Gav? The Stormfather and Sibling bickering about how humans are the worst, and now they're inlaws? Accidental "time travel" to another era (via the Spiritual Realm flashbacks) and having to make senses of things there? AU where Navani chooses Dalinar instead of Gavilar back in the day? Does she meet the same fate as Evi?

Navani/Raboniel: Bonding over science and figuring things out together! Is the Sibling exasperated, or trying to set them up? Parallels between their grief for their kids? What if Raboniel had been more honest about what the Anti-Voidlight was for, and Navani realizes she doesn't really want Raboniel dead? For this prompt, I'd prefer no infidelity--so an AU where Navani/Dalinar aren't a thing, or Raboniel lives and reconnects with Navani after Dalinar's death?

Renarin/Rlain: When did Rlain first have feelings for Renarin? Early moments in Bridge Four, the biggest outsiders even among outsiders? What's next after "Wind and Truth"? Culture shock? Trying to make things work in the new listener society?

Shallan/Adolin: More adventures in the Cognitive Realm? Trying to keep in touch via the communication spren post-canon? Pattern, Testament, or Maya's POV on their relationship? I'm not super interested in Shallan's alternate identities, so I'd prefer if they weren't a heavy focus.

Crossover Fandom

Sazed (Mistborn) and Taravangian (Stormlight Archive)
Rowan (Steerswoman) and Shallan Davar (Stormlight Archive)
Mikhail Rodinovich Bykov (Debrief) and Alexander Molokov (Chess)
Cordelia Naismith (Vorkosigan Saga) and Rowan (Steerswoman)

Sazed and Taravangian: They both control two Shards now--Sazed's seem like inherent opposites, Taravangian's don't. What happens when they meet? Taravangian tries to talk Sazed into letting Taravangian combine more shards for the greater good? Sazed turns Taravangian's logic against him? Could they meet in some kind of pocket universe/Cognitive Realm nonsense/AU setting where their immense powers don't really come into play and it's just the two guys bickering at each other?

Rowan and Shallan: Both of them have conversations in their respective fourth books that hinge on a misunderstanding of "power," and it's just like...two nickels! Shallan stumbles through a weird portal in the Cognitive Realm and winds up in Rowan's realm? One of them happens across the other one's logbooks? AU where Jasnah is a Steerswoman and Shallan is her apprentice? (I imagine that the Steerswomen's prohibition against lying would be a disaster waiting to happen with Shallan's...everything.)

Bykov and Molokov: It might require a little timeline fudging, but I imagine Bykov being a mentor to Molokov and both completely hating their jobs. Molokov: "this is so dumb, they're making me go to a chess championship and pretend I care about chess, the indignity." Bykov: "stop complaining, when I was your age I was a handler for a double agent dealing with ghost shit." "There's no way that's real, that's just a legend to haze new recruits." "You probably don't have clearance to hear about the ghost shit, forget I said anything."

Cordelia and Rowan: Credit to pendrecarc on dreamwidth for coming up with this galaxy-brained prompt: what if Rowan's world was the long-lost Alpha Colony, and the Betan Astronomical Survey team rediscovered it instead of the events of "Shards of Honor"? Maybe Cordelia finally explains to Rowan what's up with the wizards, or maybe she accidentally winds up under the ban and gets very exasperated with "Alpha colonists!" How much do the "Christers" know about their homeworld, and what does Cordelia make of them? I'm fine with a / aspect to this relationship too. (I have not read beyond "The Vor Game;" I'm fine with spoilers if you want to bring in Vorkosigan characters/events from beyond that point, but some of it may be lost on me.)

--
As usual, all of this is optional, anything about these fandoms/relationships will be great. Thanks for creating for me!

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Yuletide/Madness/Tagmod Nonsense 2025 Reveals

2026-01-02T01:51:19Z

So I've been working on a long project which continues to be...in progress, and in part due to that, my main collection output was not particularly prolific, but, events conspired in such a way that I produced plenty of tiny ficlets!

My original assignment was for "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook to Surviving Medieval England." When I first read it, my reaction was: "There's also a tantalizing offscreen subplot hinted at involving the "Waelish" who preceded the Anglo-Saxon arrivals, but despite my guesses and extrapolations about what was going on there, it didn't really turn out to be as prominent as I'd expected." The Waelish leader is a King Arthur expy! Which is interesting! But then he just...doesn't play into the overall plot.

Anyway, as a tagmod, I get to be privy to discussions in tagmod chat as nominations come in. One of my fellow tagmods took a screenshot of this book, nominated with the only character "The Black Bear," and commented "this is also making me laugh. Probably it's clear! It's just funny. The only character." So immediately I responded:

i have that book and can fact-check (i don't remember that character)

ohhhh is it the [spoiler tag]king arthur expy[/spoiler] who never appears on screen 😠

(i wanted that character to be more of a thing than he was 🙁

yeah, he's an offscreen bad guy. [spoiler]the Waelish king[/spoiler]

Anyway, someone requested him and was interested in his POV on the conflict/other Arthurian allusions, so I was very excited about offering that, and then that was what I matched on! Like I mentioned before, canon review was relatively quick (the Bear is only mentioned in a couple offscreen places), it was just a matter of procrastinating until I finally wrote it. In a world where the monotheists are Zoroastrians instead of Christians, presumably they'd go on a quest for the sacred fire rather than the Holy Grail!

Very loose correspondences to the Arthurian knights, somewhat based on notes I took on Le Morte d'Arthur years ago:

The Boar ~ Sir Bors
The White Shoat ~ Helin the White (Bors' son)
The Peacock ~ Sir Persaunte, the Indigo Knight
The Lark ~ Dinadan
The Turtle ~ Tristram
The Otter ~ Lancelot
The Cub ~ Galahad
The Bull ~ Palomides (Zoroastrianism celebrates a "primordial bovine"!)

Also, 2023 me noted: "There are a lot of illustrations/marginalia (especially for the in-universe portions), done by Steve Argyle, which I think I'll be able to better appreciate when I get a hard copy." Well, this was my first time reading the hard copy cover to cover, and sure enough, in the inside back cover, there are pictures of the characters in the post-canon era. Runian and Sefawynn getting their happily-ever-after while Logna looks on from a distance, etc. And there's also one of Yazad...with a bunch of windmills, implying he succeeded in teaching that technology to the locals <3

The True Tale of the Black Bear (1681 words)
Fandom: The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England - Brandon Sanderson
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Black Bear (The Frugal Wizard's Handbook)
Additional Tags: arthuriana
Summary: Come, all you Keltmen, and hear of your hero, most feared in the forest! Accept no slanderous skop's substitutes, none of Logna's lies.

Then for Steerswoman, some in-universe mythology based on one of the stories Rowan hears at Rendezvous (and later tells Steffie).

Outcast (1156 words)
Fandom: Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: In-Universe Mythology, Outskirters, Ghosts
Summary: "Rowan heard of...a haunting, where the spirit of an uncast man killed his tribe's goats, one by one, until his body was found and given proper rites." -The Outskirter's Secret

Madness:

I saw a request for crossovers with the Snake Fight Thesis Defense, and the requester linked to a list of 100 influential books. Scrolling through that I was like...this person has great tastes, all of these academic types should fight the snake. So I turned it into a drabble sequence. (Crossover fandoms are: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Kairos (Murry-O'Keefe) books; Oxford Time Travel Universe; Vorkosigan Saga; Steerswoman)

Not An Exact Science (526 words)
Fandom: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion of Your Thesis Defense - Luke Burns
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Drabble Sequence, 5 Things, Crossover
Summary: Five worlds where the snake fight thesis became a tradition.

I have been super into Slay the Spire for the last few months, so I figured I'd write something for the Merchant. It turned out to be a one-sided conversation between the Merchant and the Watcher.

Masked Man (674 words)
Fandom: Slay the Spire (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Merchant (Slay the Spire), Watcher (Slay the Spire)
Summary: Only two things are certain here, death and my completely arbitrary sale prices! But mostly death.

My first stab at the Steerswoman fic was on the shorter side, so it was like, "maybe I'll write several pieces of in-universe mythology and collect them into an anthology-type thing." Then when I wrote "Outcast" it was like, okay, this is already 1000 words, fine. So I posted this separately in Madness. It's a...very different kind of in-universe mythology story.

The Cloven Men (424 words)
Fandom: Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: In-Universe Mythology, Canon-Typical Sexism
Summary: Steerswoman have gathered all sorts of stories, from Inner Landers and Outskirters and even Christers.

But there are other, ancient, stories, in this world, that no Steerswoman has yet heard nor seen.

The three-minute song/music video "The Devil Went Up To Boston" (a rewrite of "The Devil Came Down To Georgia") was linked on the promo post on September 16. I got around to watching/listening to it on December 22. Typical Yuletide procrastination. (In the video, Sully wears a Red Sox hat and the Devil wears a Yankees hat. Which is great, but also, Damn Yankees crossover potential?)

Anyway, we have the devil. He makes deals for people's souls. He goes to Boston. The subway cops get mad. If you are like me, and familiar with goofy songs via Yuletide osmosis, the conclusion is obvious.

Counterproposal (100 words)
Fandom: The Devil Came Up to Boston - The Adam Ezra Group (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: The Devil (Devil Went Down to Georgia), Sully (Devil Came Up to Boston)
Additional Tags: Drabble, yumadrin, Crossover, Canon-typical language
Summary: And you thought the subway cops were mad before.

Anyway, then Yuletide came around and the fics revealed and we all got our gifts and lived happily ever after OH WAIT there was a weird glitch and the authors revealed. The mods and tagmods who were around did yeopeople's effort in getting things fixed and re-anonymized, I get zero credit for this because I was going to Christmas Eve worship. But then they were like "what causes the glitch, can we test it, let's do science." And then they set up a mini-Madness type thing for tagmods to treat each other, basically just treating it as "any fandom I've requested before" via the autoapp.

Now the thing about Yuletide mods and tagmods is that they have exquisite tastes in fandoms. So it was very "senpai noticed me!" when I got recruited. And there would be a zero percent chance of me creating for all the possible recips I could, even if I had all of the Yuletide creation period. But! Because it was so short-term and low stakes, I was able to relax enough to just do some short ficlets (which I put on my 3SF/art sock) and not worrying about making it epic masterpieces. (This was Christmas Eve night for me--less busy for my family than previous years but that's another story.) I was able to focus enough to treat the mod-mods, and the newest members of the tagmod team.

What if Baze and Chirrut (from Rogue One) were nohecharei (from The Goblin Emperor)? That's it that's the fic.

Firsts in War (235 words)
Fandom: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus
Characters: Baze Malbus, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Fusion
Summary: The first nohecharis has a favor to beg of Her Serenity.

Prompt was for Shara and Olvos from Divine Cities, but it's from Tatyana's POV. (I may have been too coy about who Olvos is. Hazard that comes with writing for old prompts.)

Eternal Flame (360 words)
Fandom: The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tatyana Komayd, Ashara "Shara" Komayd
Summary: Parents worrying about their kids is a universal.

Another prompt was for A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), horror. Hmm, do they have Christmas in ASOUE-world? I think I remember reading somewhere that that setting seems to be more culturally Jewish. Maybe they have Hanukkah. Maybe from a certain point of view, Hanukkah lends itself to horror tropes.

Wick(ed) (477 words)
Fandom: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Violet Baudelaire, Klaus Baudelaire, Sunny Baudelaire
Additional Tags: Hanukkah, Horror, Lemony Snicket Narrative Style
Summary: One person's miracle is another person's horror story.

And then for a fellow roguelike appreciator, FTL! Anything silly that would work in the FTL setting? What if the Biblical Epiphany story was an FTL encounter, that seems like the kind of absurdity they would go for.

Star of the East (310 words)
Fandom: FTL: Faster Than Light (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Christmas, Biblical Epiphany Narrative
Summary: Wise beings have traveled a long way for this. Like, a really long way.

I already knew that mod pendrecarc enjoyed Divine Cities and Steerswoman, so clearly more exquisite tastes, but also I had just written for those so I was kind of in the mood for something different. And then I saw this extremely galaxy-brained prompt: what if Rowan's world was the long-lost Alpha Colony, and Cordelia Naismith (from the Vorkosigan Saga) had discovered it in the Shards of Honor era? Yes please. This is totally a premise that deserves a 10k epic, but a 400 word ficlet is what we're getting, so there. Also there was still time to nom it for Candy Hearts so...yes, I will be plagiarizing some prompts there.

Shards of a Guidestar (436 words)
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Rowan (Steerswoman)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Canon-typical levels of dysentery, Dubauer can't catch a break on any planet, Religion
Summary: Cordelia gets stuck on a technologically primitive planet. You know how this goes.

Of course when I went to post this on my sock I was kind of tired and I just kind of...forgot about...the "post to collection" button. So I just hit "post" and did it the normal way. Which meant it was not anon and pendrecarc, who came up with the idea in the first place and was the original collection maintainer, got an email notification. From an unfamiliar username, not the one I normally use in the tagmod channel. So while we were trying to troubleshoot the anonymity glitch, it was like, "what's going on now." "Nothing interesting, just user error, sorry." "Oh okay!"

And so then we lived happily ever after.

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(SFF Bingo): The Outside, by Ada Hoffmann

2026-01-01T21:52:23Z

Ada Hoffmann first came to my attention via The Neurodiversiverse anthology. This is the first installment in a trilogy. In a future where superintelligent AI are worshiped as gods, an autistic scientist accidentally causes a disaster on a space station. As a result, she's basically kidnapped by angels working for the god Nemesis, who need her help in tracking down her former doctorate advisor. Both the forces of Nemesis and the heretic Dr. Talirr have the potential to cause terror, so Yasira does a lot of bouncing between a rock and a hard place. "The Outside" refers to forces beyond our universe's space and time, which occasionally breach containment and cause "madness" in onlookers, but of course, "madness" is subjective. (In the acknowledgements, Hoffmann places this book within the stream of "Lovecraftian subversion.")

The worldbuilding of AI-as-gods requiring mortal trust to perpetuate themselves, and eventually absorbing human souls after they die, is fascinating. Ditto some humans' desire to build their own space stations without relying on godly technology. The glimpses we get of other alien species are great:

Your Boater dictionary had two words in it before you started drawing on my work. And both the words were variations on 'destroy the soul-eating abominations.'

...

However, any culture studied in sufficient detail will yield up a word, and often a fairly sophisticated system of safeguards and protections, for the things in this universe which are inherently incomprehensible to sentient minds. The semantics of the word chosen can be culturally informative. My favorite, of course, is the Spider term: Ȋsȋrinin-neri-ȋnik, or 'that which eats reality.'

Yasira comes from a culture that's comparatively accessible for disabled and neurodiverse people, and that filters through early. This description felt true-to-life:

Yasira's neurotype was supposed to be all about joy, about being so in love with science and knowledge and patterns that they eclipsed everything else. She'd been like that as a child, throwing herself into dusty physics texts the way other kids played games or ate candy. So excited when she tackled a new problem that she'd abruptly throw the book down and run around the house laughing. At some point, maybe in grad school, that had faded somehow. Who knew why? She was still good at the things people liked her to do, so there wasn't much wrong. Maybe it was just part of growing up.

I would have liked to see even more contrasts of how someone like Yasira might relate to angels or nonhuman entities differently than other humans would. This struck me as strange:

Akavi peered over Yasira's shoulder at the chart of the galaxy. This was unnecessary, since he had downloaded the chart into his head and could mentally examine it from whatever angle he pleased. But the physical signs of shared attention helped put mortals at ease.

The Outside, by definition, is outside ordinary understanding and language, so any depiction of it is inherently vague. It wasn't too much gross-out horror for me, but I'm not super into "we can't describe it, it was just some bizarre wrongness."

I would have liked more worldbuilding about what happens to humans after they die and how that relates to the gods. Yasira, quite understandably, is reluctant to do things that will get people killed; life, even life with some "madness," is better than death! But in a world where the existence of afterlives is common knowledge rather than a matter of faith, I imagine people's ethical calculations would be different in some circumstances. I didn't get enough of "how divine are the 'gods,' really" to feel like I necessarily understood Yasira's reactions.

( Vague spoilers )

Yasira's girlfriend, Tiv, comes from a culture with great names and nicknames: "Tiv" is short for Productivity, "Citizenship" goes by "Ship," etc. Yasira struggles to have faith in the gods or experience religious transcendence; she looks to Tiv as an example of how a "good girl" would behave. Unfortunately, most of the time she's offscreen, and it's mostly like "if you ever want to see Tiv again, you better do as we say." We don't get a good sense of what Tiv sees in Yasira; to me, these sorts of relationships can come off as "anxious autistic person and their emotional support neurotypical." I understand that some people will value seeing f/f romance depicted in these settings! In my entirely personal opinion, I would have liked to see other kinds of relationships in Yasira's life.

(There is also a very funny subplot involving an angel who's crushing on his clueless boss, featuring a great Ironic Echo resolution.)

Bingo: Gods and Pantheons, LGBTQIA protagonist, Impossible Places, Epistolary (almost every chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph)

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